Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  But that ceremony had been so much easier than this reality. He looked at the camel churning in agony on the sand, and didn’t feel like a man. He felt like a stupid boy, just pretending. The desert had shown him its reward for arrogance and inattention. Life in the Sahara was so difficult. One needed to be born to it to fully understand its ways, and even then it took great skill and cunning to survive.

  Once he had been allowed to make a march of three nights with some of the men. It was near summer’s end, the air still searing during the day. Moussa had been given the responsibility for filling and carrying the water skins. The first day he loaded them on his camel and tended them carefully, making sure not a drop was spilled. That night after the last tea had been prepared, he propped the skins next to his bed on the sand, mindful to keep the tops up. In the morning he awoke and discovered to his horror that they were all empty, their water sucked through the skins into the sand. Because of him six men had gone without water for two days and nights.

  The desert was full of such lessons that crushed one’s vanities. He despaired of ever achieving a mastery of it. Was he really ready to carry the weapons of nobility? Ready to assume the mantle of a lord of the Kel Rela, responsible for the lives of his vassals and slaves, responsible for their families and property, responsible for leading raids against the Tebu and the Shamba, and against caravans who dared pass through the desert without paying duty, and for trading with the masters of those caravans and for increasing the wealth of the tribe? The list of a noble’s burdens went on and on, and he felt only doubt. So much responsibility. Too much, he thought sometimes. More than a man could carry, and he wasn’t even a man.

  He felt like a fraud.

  Reluctantly, Moussa turned to his awful chore, to end his camel’s misery. He slipped the blade from its sheath beneath the robes of his forearm. Taba’s mouth was foaming, his eyes wild with pain. He struggled to rise, but collapsed and rolled over to one side. He gave a long slow sigh of rage and frustration. Moussa took the knife in both hands and drew a deep breath. He plunged the blade deep and cut quickly. The blood gushed hot and sticky, soaking his forearms and hands and robe. It was too late to get out of the way, so he just knelt there and let it flow and closed his eyes while the life ran out of the beast, into the sand.

  It was not possible to love a camel, not in the way one might love a dog or a horse. Camels were quirky and ill-tempered and quick to spit. They could crush a man’s head with their bite, or throw up a nauseating green muck that they could aim with stunning accuracy. They cried and complained and carried on. They were awkward contraptions, not properly designed, really, for anything except desert travel. But he had come close to loving this one. Taba had dignity and a gentle nature. He had admired the camel long before it had become his own. He had helped train it, and tended its sores. He saw that it got the best pasture and that its hobbles weren’t too tight. He had checked its droppings for disease, and carried water for it when the watering hole was too deep. One day at dawn he had mounted the camel when no one was around. He rode it from one end of a clearing to the other, Taba responding instantly to the pressure of his feet. Moussa had laughed out loud when the animal produced an unexpected burst of speed, but he took care not to push it too hard. Then he’d looked up to see the amenokal watching. He slowed immediately, ashamed at having ridden the animal in such a way without permission.

  “I am sorry, Abba,” he said. Abba, he called the amenokal when they were alone. Father. They were close, the chief and the boy, yet the amenokal could be stern and harsh and cold, and his words could sting like a whip. But that morning he only laughed and waved him on. “Give Taba your wings,” he said. “See how he feels in flight,” and Moussa’s eyes widened in delight. He spurred the animal on, and although the young camel had never been let go like that it ran strong and felt sure beneath him, and the wind blew through his hair and he bounced at first at the awkward gait but quickly recovered and held himself erect and took Taba faster, ever faster until they were at full attack trot, and he imagined himself at the head of a great column of warriors, his new sword lopping off the heads of the enemies of the Ihaggaren.

  Yes, Taba, you were a good camel, he thought. A good camel that deserved better than to die at the hands of his incompetence. Eyes still closed, he stroked its head and whispered to it while it died. Hot tears streaked his cheeks. Even if they were hidden beneath his veil, he was glad no one else was there to watch.

  When it was over he shook off his self-pity and set about salvaging what he could of the situation. Losing the camel was bad enough. He knew better than to lose the meat as well. Quickly he set about skinning and quartering it. He needed no salt. The desert air would dry the meat quickly enough. It would be tough, but there was nothing to be done about that. He found a natural shelter in the rocks where he could leave the meat and skin. After he had dragged everything to it he piled smaller rocks at the opening to keep the carrion-eaters away. Then he marked the spot with a stone cairn. He would return later with another camel to collect everything. His labors took most of the afternoon. When he had finished he didn’t rest. He was determined to redeem himself, and set off on foot.

  He climbed to the top of a granite pinnacle that stood like a sentinel above the surrounding landscape. A lone cypress tree stood there. It was a massive, ancient tree that for two thousand years had been an unfailing landmark. Lightning had hit it a dozen times, leaving black scars up and down the knotted trunk. But the tree seemed stronger for it, twisted and scorched but unyielding, overlord of the land below. Its mighty branches had provided shade for a wetter world that once ran fast with chariots and cheetahs and sparkled with pools and streams that were alive with hippos and crocodiles and fish. The Roman legions of Cornelius Barbus had camped beneath it. There were still rare crocodiles and fish and lions, but most were gone now, having given way to the inexorable creeping desert.

  But whatever became of the land, that tree would still be there. Moussa sat in its shade and looked out over the vast distances – the heat shimmering off the rocks, the earth before him all gold and black, stretching away to the ragged peaks of the Atakor, the highest part of the desert mountains. The Hoggar was an astonishing world whose beauty he was just beginning to appreciate. The Bled el Shuf, the Shamba called it, the Land of Thirst and Fear, but the civilized men of the Hoggar knew them to be ignorant, the Shamba, as empty-headed as they were savage, and quite incapable of comprehending such beauty. There were cones and spires and animated shapes that seemed alive, silhouettes of fantasia that fed daydreams and told stories and spawned legends. They were starkly beautiful, these mountains, each of them male or female, according to Tuareg lore, each with a name, a range of mountains that gave haven to hawks and eagles and mountain sheep, as well as to men. It was a fortress, the Hoggar, cooler and wetter than the surrounding desert, its rocks heaved into a great desert castle, a stone sanctuary in which its Tuareg inhabitants had found safety and food for nearly as long as the cypress tree had grown.

  The mood of the mountains changed throughout the day, the colors rich and varied. Dawn was his favorite time, fresh and cool and full of promise. At midday in high summer the sun was master, humbling everything with its relentless fire. After the fire passed the desert seemed softer and the yellows ran to gold and at sunset the sky would flame red and orange before it faded to purple and gave way to a carpet of stars.

  That afternoon the rains had washed the dust from the sky, and as the day died, it had no color but a blue so deep it was almost a night sky. The storms had spent themselves, and now there was no trace of them left in the sky, no distant clouds or even any humidity. He wondered if there would be other storms that year, or the next. Whenever it came the rain was savage and poured in torrents from the heavens. The first three years of his life in the desert it hadn’t rained at all. Even some of the permanent gueltas had dried up. In the fourth year the rain brought floods that wiped out an entire camp of Kel Ulli, leaving swollen corpses to d
ry in a blazing sun. He had seen their twisted bodies, the children and the goats and the men and women, lying among the flowers that sprang up from the storm. Beauty and life and death, all from a rain.

  He peered through his spyglass and listened for sounds of the hunt, for the excited shouts that meant the chase was hot, for the bellows and roars of men and their camels that would reverberate through the rocks, but there was nothing. No Tuareg, no ostriches. Only a light wind, whispering from the east. He waited and watched and listened as the shadows grew longer and the afternoon became night. When it was dark he climbed back down. He made tea and then curled up in a sandy bed in the shelter of a granite overhang, drawing his cloak around him to keep out the chill night air. He was too troubled to sleep, and spent the night looking up at the heavy blanket of stars. He tried to count them but could not, and looked for the constellations his mother had taught him, and watched them turn their slow shimmering arc around him.

  He remembered the awe of his first desert night, the dazzling web so clear and bright. He had never seen such a sky when he lived in Paris. The lights of the city were too bright. The lights, such lights… it was six long years since he’d last seen them. Or was it seven now, or even eight? The years ran together and time lost its urgency and sometimes he didn’t notice its passage at all. But surely it was a lifetime since Paris. He was happy in the desert yet sometimes longed to be back in the city, to see what it was like now. His memories of it were fond, the bad parts seeming not so bad, the good parts seeming better than they were. But the more time passed, the harder it became to remember at all. No matter how he tried to hold on, the treasures of his past no longer burned so brightly in his memory. The details dimmed and the people grew fuzzy, and he couldn’t remember what some of them looked like. He closed his eyes and tried to bring them up, Paul and Gascon and Aunt Elisabeth, but sometimes he couldn’t do it. It worried him terribly when it happened. It seemed as if he didn’t care. He did care, he told himself. He didn’t want to be unfaithful. He didn’t want to lose his other life completely. He asked the marabout for paper and drew pictures of his father with scraps of charcoal. The pictures were crude, but they helped him remember. He promised himself a thousand times that no matter what happened to the other faces and places in his mind, he would never let himself forget his father’s face. He folded the papers carefully and put them in a leather pouch that hung from his neck, and at night by the fire took them out to look. After he had folded and unfolded them many times the pictures would smear, and he would draw new ones.

  One winter he had spotted a lone viper in the sandy wastes near Amguid, and he pointed at it excitedly to Lufti, his slave, and said, “Look, there’s a—” And he realized he couldn’t remember the word for it in French, and didn’t know the Tamashek word for it, and it terrified him. All the rest of that winter he silently reminded himself of the French word for everything he saw.

  His thoughts came in both languages, but more and more they came in Tamashek. He fought the shift but couldn’t stop its slow progression. There was no one with whom to speak French except his mother, and as he grew older and spent more time traveling through the desert camps, he saw her rarely. He asked whether anyone wanted to learn the language, but none of his friends had any use for a barbarian tongue. So he contented himself with teaching Lufti, who paid rapt attention to his master’s foreign babble but learned nothing at all.

  He missed Paul, terribly at first, so much it burned, yet time had dimmed those fires as well. He wondered whether his cousin still thought of him, on those nights when he couldn’t sleep. Was he looking at that star this very instant? Had he felt that wind on his face? He’d written him a score of letters, letters he gave to the caravan masters to mail when they arrived at the coast. But no letters ever came back. Maybe Paul had died in the war. Maybe the Prussians had burned the château and everyone in it. He asked for news of France from the same caravan masters. They knew of nothing save the conditions of their routes and the price of slaves in Tangier and word of plague in Hausaland to the south, of new taxes imposed by the bey of Constantine and the revolt in Tripolitania. Some of them could speak six languages, and their knowledge spanned thousands of leagues. But they knew little of France and her wars, and cared less.

  And so over time a whole world disappeared.

  He talked to his mother about it sometimes, but her eyes misted and her voice broke. He knew that memories were difficult for her, and so the silences about those times grew between them, and they dwelled in the present. Now it was only at night, when he was alone like this, that his mind wandered back to Paris – to brief flashes of the colors and fine carriages, to the white snows and fall leaves of the Bois de Boulogne; and the bitter winter nights when his father sat in his study before a roaring fire, reading a book or writing a letter, or telling a story to the two boys who sat with him; to afternoons spent ice-skating, and to the lazy Seine that carried more water in an hour than his new world saw in a year. It was another life, most of it hard to believe now. Sometimes, as he told new friends about the old world, he wondered which parts he really remembered and which parts he only imagined.

  It was an awkward time, when nothing was settled in his life. He was stuck between things: neither French nor Tuareg, man nor boy. He had left France too young to comprehend what had happened there, and he still didn’t understand this desert. “You must be patient,” the amenokal told him. “You are in such a hurry for your life, for understanding. You are Moussa, and for the moment that is enough.”

  He slept fitfully at last. The hours passed and the first gray light of dawn streaked the horizon. He shook off the night chill and made a fire for tea, and as he squatted before the flames his mind returned to the hunt. He would continue it alone.

  At dawn he was moving again, trotting quickly through the rocky terrain, sometimes following the wadis, other times jumping from rock to rock, all his senses alert. He knew the most likely places to look, places that after the rains had the thickest growth and offered the best shelter for the birds. He alternately ran and walked and ran for hours on end. His feet shuffled softly atop the sand, the rhythm of his motion fluid and smooth as he looked for signs of the flock. At midmorning he drew up sharply. He saw their tracks in some hard-pack sand. He couldn’t yet read the signs well enough to know how many there were, or how fast they were moving, or even how fresh the tracks were. Lufti could have told him all that, and probably even what sex and age the individual birds were, but Lufti had stayed in camp, burning with fever.

  He had been at it several hours when he spotted the big male, and behind it the others. He tried to contain his excitement, but as he watched the birds he exulted: This is my flock. It will make up for Taba. He set his rope and guerba on a rock and scouted the area. Carefully he climbed up and around, well out of sight of the birds. As he realized where they were his hopes soared. They were grazing at the narrow end of a glen with steep walls. At the far end the water trickled down from the plateau above, splashing into a small pool. He circled all the way around to be sure. The birds had no way out! Of course, he had to get them to run the right way, and then came the hard part, preventing their escape once they realized their predicament. He had no desire to see what a blow from the big animal would do to his own leg.

  He began collecting bits of scrub and brush. There was a surprising amount of growth scattered among the rocks, and before long he had a pile assembled. He used stronger branches to make a framework along the bottom, and filled in the gaps with brush. He used his rope to loosely tie the brush together, until he had a long light pile of it, a little taller than he was and about three meters in length. If he could drag it quickly enough, he could block the entrance to the defile. He hoped the birds were too stupid to realize how easy it would be to get back past it, that to them it would simply look like an impassable wall. Of course he’d be standing there shrieking like ten djenoums to discourage their investigations. After that – well, after that he didn’t know exac
tly what he’d do. He’d never hunted ostriches.

  When he finished he tugged on the end of the rope to test it. Some of the brush on top bunched up against the rope. Everything leaned to one side, and collapsed to the ground. Patiently he stacked it again, and re-routed his rope. It was a fragile mess, but there was no time to make it stronger.

  Stealthily, he moved his little weed fence, crouching in front as he pulled it along toward the opening. He was downwind of the ostriches, who had shown no sign of fright. He could see their heads buried in their work as they pulled at the tender new shoots. When he had drawn as close as he dared, he jumped up suddenly, waving his hands and running straight at the small flock. The heads of the birds sprang up from grazing as the ostriches sensed his presence. As one they turned and shot down the wadi. Moussa whooped and shouted, even though they were deaf. As soon as they had passed, the opening that he intended to block, he stopped and raced back to his pile. Furiously he dragged it along, desperate to beat the birds, who would quickly reach the other end of the trap, at which point they would turn once again and race through the glen at full speed in his direction.

  The going was tough. Twice a part of the contraption snagged on rocks, but he coaxed and pulled and prodded until he had it to the opening. He dropped his rope and ran to the rear, to pull it around to close the trap, when he heard the birds coming, all nine of them, the heaviest more than a hundred and fifty kilos, the lightest just a baby but still weighing more than Moussa did, and his heart caught in his throat. They ran nearly sixty kilometers an hour, lifting their legs delicately as if striding on air. The big male was in front, two other smaller males just behind, the females and yearlings in the rear. Desperately, Moussa pulled on the weed blockade, and as it closed the gap his heart sank. It was too short to completely block the opening. He could do no more with it, so he turned to face the oncoming horde. He stood in front of the opening, raising his arms high and wide to make himself as fearsome and large and terrible as he could, then waving his arms as he jumped up and down, choking back his panic as he watched the wings and necks and feathers and feet bearing down madly upon him. He started screaming at them, and at the last second, as he was getting ready to jump for his life, the lead bird turned and headed back the other way.